• Bathtub Review: Cursed Cave of a Billion Bats

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    The Cursed Cave of a Billion Bats is a 20 page one-shot or tournament system-agnostic module by Dale Houston. In it, you are drawn into the so-called “Nightmare Cave” with the promise of gold, but will you survive? I received a complementary copy from the author.

    The layout is dense, but clear, with smart usability choices like having no locations crossing pages. The only potential problem I can see is that it uses colour coding on the maps to signify climb difficulty, room environment, and the presence of large clouds of bats, which is visually busy and potentially won’t work for all visions — easily fixed by using different shading or dotted vs. bold lines, or something of the like. Both cover by Daniel Harila Carlsen, and the interior art by Perplexing Ruins are excellent, although I’d love to have seen less pages with no illustration. The maps — a three-dimensional cave map and a point-crawl map for those having trouble with the first, are both pretty great — the primary map especially I think does a great job of communicating the interconnected nature of the space without it becoming overwhelming.

    Our first page is our hook. and the local village Flotsammar. It’s simple, in a way I genuinely love, with contrasts that raise questions that I hope the dungeon will reveal to me. The three NPCs here have interesting characterisations that make me want to play them, although I’d love for them to have clearer reasons to manipulate the player characters in one direction or another, or bait them into the dungeon. We have 3 d6 tables of rumours, as well, although only 2 of them are on the surface about the Cave, and the other, about the town, would require me to improvise a bit more town than I’d prefer to. Overall. though, it’s a great initial impression.

    I mentioned the three dimensional cave map, and it’s well supported by the rules on traversing the cursed cave, which pulls in rules about how light interacts with the bats, and about how to climb shafts of varying difficulty, and also how to secure them, making the dungeon a bit of a metroidvania in terms of making difficult climbs and securing them, or finding alternate ways to the top of hard climbs in order to secure them for quicker traversal. The only misstep I think is that it doesn’t explain these rules directly to the players: I would. It does say “make sure they know the amount of light is important“, but I’d probably include this as something that would be said to the players in town, so that it’s very clear that too much light will disturb the bats. It’s something that could’ve been baked into the world-building, rather than just given as advice.

    The module is explicitly a deadly module, which results in a lot of combat encounters, but ones that effort is put into to make interesting — a favourite is the flea knight who leaps in and out of combat. Expect 12 empty rooms and the rest being occupied by either combat or hazards; I’d love for a little more of interest to be in those 12 empty rooms, though. They’re appropriately empty, I think, because rest and space to flee and regroup the difficult combat encounters and bat swarms are necessary for survival, but I’d love to have seen a little more lore parcelled out in pieces throughout them that would allow you to form opinions about Aramor the Mad and the curse of the cave before getting to the final room; this would add some interesting spice to the module that simply isn’t there right now: Why wouldn’t you murder and take the treasure? Random encounters will likely occupy many of those empty rooms, but half of these are combat encounters (most with creatures you’ll see elsewhere in the dungeon, but that aren’t tied to specific rooms), and the others being debuffs with no particular warning. I’d love to have attached some kind of warning or choice to these random encounters. There is one absolutely fantastic one, though, which more heavily looped dungeons should use: A chamber collapse, which renders a room impassible, and will require further exploration. You could base an entire module around this one random encounter to compelling effect, I think.

    The book finishes with treasure and monsters. Some very fun and well-described treasure is in this list. The monsters, are well-described, particularly in terms of tactics, but I fear players may have trouble differentiating between all the bat-themed creatures. I also wish the flea-themed creatures had been given a bit more space, because they’re cool — is there a culture of flea-people? I want to know about them! I’ll have to look more into Houston’s other work, though, because the monster stats have a few features I really like, pulled by a variety of potential sources. As well as typical HD, AC, and Movement, they have a mien, ferocity, and weaknesses, as well as “encounters” which describes why you might be meeting them. This is cool stuff, although it would benefit from clearer description — it’s clear that Ferocity is effectively morale, but I don’ t know what Ap or Threat necessarily means.

    Finally there’s a score sheet, because this is a tournament module. I, relatively recently talked about how I wish there were more tournament modules with score sheets: This slaps, and makes the module far more playable, particularly if they know at least roughly the score sheet, which will push them towards even more foolhardy choices.

    Cursed Cave of One Billion Bats is a really cool, one-shot module, with a lot of cool design choices. At the table, you might want to make sure your players are excited about high lethality, combat intensive play, and there’s not a lot of lore or puzzle-like inclusions to keep those who aren’t engaged. If you were to run this at a small con with a few tables, the tournament score sheet would make for a lot of fun. In a lot of ways, it’s a few strong steps towards meeting modern module expectations with some very specific old-school sensibilities that are rarely considered. I really liked Cursed Cave of One Billion Bats, and if you’re looking for a lethal one shot or are interested in something to run tournament style at a small con, I’d take a look.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and other work, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Taking the Highest Die (Make Dice Work For You #4)

    Make Dice Work For You is a series where I’ll regularly talk through a new way to use dice in your game. It came out of conversation surrounding What to randomise when you’re randomising, and what advanced techniques you can use for specific needs. I’ll where I know, but please help me out if you know a citation and I don’t have one, or if you know an example that I can add!

    In Dice Curves we talked about the bell curve that occurs when you roll more than one dice and add the results. So, what happens when you roll more than one dice, and drop the highest or lowest dice? The most common version of this you see is called Advantage and Disadvantage, which was popularised by 5th edition D&D — there, where you’d normally roll 1d20, you can instead, if you have advantage, roll 2d20, and take the highest result.

    Basically, this takes a flat distribution, and turns it into a distribution that leans towards the highest result. If you drop the highest instead, it leans the other way, in a very predictable way:

    For what it’s worth, I’m using 6 sided dice rather than 20 sided because it takes up more space; the likelihoods are similar.

    Who cares? Well, in the original version, this is effectively a bonus, but with different characteristics. The differences in these characteristics might be important to you:

    Here, median means the average rolled. You can see that for advantage vs. for a +1 bonus, the average result is basically the same, as are the deviations. However, the minimum and maximum results are different. So, advantage is a way to roll something with a bonus, without changing the possible range. The value of the equivalent bonus, for your information, changes depending on the size of the die — for a 20 sided die, it’s about +5 rather than +1.

    Ok, so the immediate use case here is to generate a result on a list where you want to results on one end of the list to occur more often. You can use this feature in combination with a curve, as well, if you’re picking the highest 2 dice of more dice.

    You can see here, as we add dice to the pool, we’re reducing the chance of a lower result, and increasing the chances of higher results, while keeping some kind of curve. You could use this to increase the chance of more dangerous or specific encounters occurring on a random encounter table, for example, instead of using a cumulative bonus.

    One interesting side-effect of this, though is that it has rapidly diminishing results. You can see on this graph (I switched styles because it was getting a bit hard to read), that as you increase the number of dice rolled, while the chances of low results become very small and high results very large, those top few results don’t change so much.

    This means that if you’re using this as a test — like the original 5th edition D&D advantage was — the payoff of advantage depends on exactly what you’re rolling over. To put it another way, you’re mostly more likely to roll at least a certain number:

    All of these examples are of taking the highest die or dice of a set, but the distribution is the same but reversed if you take the lowest die or dice of a set. Some clever person is going to ask what happens if you take the middle rolled result of a set. If you’re taking the result of 1 die, it works how you’d expect, which is it makes the bell curve more extreme than our basic 2 dice added distribution:

    One final thing. You can use this method with multiple die sizes, for specific use cases; the most interesting thing here is that higher numbers in these cases are more stable. The main use case I can think of is that the higher die sizes signify changes in the situation, where those list items could never occur otherwise:

    Basic Structure: Roll one or more dice and take the highest (or lowest, or middle) result, or drop the lowest result.

    Effect: Preference the results higher on the list, while maintaining the same range of results.

    Alternatives: Use addition or subtraction bonuses to adjust the numbers affected by the curve instead, but this will change the range of numbers in the list (you might want this!).

    Hope this helps!

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and other work, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

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  • Bathtub Review: The Hand of God

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    You might recall that back when I reviewed Goblin Mail, I bemoaned the lack of modules for Troika! and the preponderance of random-table-only settings, which I’m on the record for not enjoying at all. Well, apparently this is a problem Melsonian Arts Council has recognised per here, and there’s a push for more official Troika! modules proper. One of these is The Hand of God, a 59 page module for Troika! by Mike Knee with development and art by Andrew Walter, who also did the recent Troika! re-release that I’m a huge fan of. In The Hand of God (within the module, referred to as THOG), the party has been left in a nest at the top of the Hand of God, and must escape down it, stealing as much fantastical treasures as they can. I purchased this myself.

    Effectively THOG is a mini-setting, a point-crawl containing multiple dungeons and multiple locations and settlements. It’s probably the most vanilla approach to Troika! I’ve seen, and I really like it, strangely enough. Perhaps the baseline weird inTroika! is such that also innovating on form is a little bit much? It’s still set on the severed hand of an ancient god, and features a roc with a hand for a face, though — a giant magpie that wants your trinkets — and whose trinket stealing is the reason there’s plenty of treasure to steal. And aside from that, you’re just commuting. I like that simplicity.

    The locations are written out in long-handed prose, something I always struggle with. Generally, we have effectively a read aloud text — these are very good, “the whistling scream of the wind is underscored by creaking of a great weight above”, followed by any specifics. After that are subheadings for “From here you can see”, i.e. exploration and exits, and for “You might find” i.e. characters, creatures or treasures. This isn’t a bad structure, I just wish it were better visually flagged. If you’re writing boxed text, just put it in a box; those people who criticise it are not criticising the box itself. Characters all get wants and knows, which is the absolute minimum in my opinion, and are excellently well described (“absolutely paper-thin patience”). The main issue is that the application of these visual cues is poor — in the Gondola Station, for example, the treasure is not in a “You might find” section, but rather in a secondary paragraph. This inconsistency makes it harder to run.

    I really like all of these locations. They feel epic, almost mythological. My favourites are the Index Scar, where an iron serpent eternally winds, carving a scar like a giant ring, the Eel King, a kind of foul fae, and the drunken zombies of Jgigli Town. But often they leave out key information. For example, in the description of this serpent, it states you can hear it grinding from above — but it’s not mentioned in any of the above locations (1, A, 2, 4 or D). You need to read the locations closely and take notes, I think, to get the most out of these locations.

    I wish the bird were a little more fleshed out. I want its presence to be randomised and frequent, always forcing the players hands, like the giant in Waking of Willowby Hall. Instead the referee is instructed to introduce it “whenever things are getting boring”. That’s disappointing to me, and I just think the bird should’ve been on the random encounter tables. And the random encounter tables are pretty good, and very Troika! “Wandering Star. During the day stars are dimmer, and vicious.” I adore the 2 page spread that is simply titled “relationships”: Eight factions all with clear and simple desires and fears.

    The layout is minimalist and if I’m not mistaken reminiscent of Troika! But I find it disconcerting, and it’s unclear to me exactly what my eye dislikes about the choices. The leading is huge, as is the paragraph spacing, and combined with the broad margins it honestly has so much white space I have trouble locating things on the page, especially when combined with variable indenting, and the odd placement of the location titles — half in outer margin, half indented to the text — is both effective for navigation and jarring visually. It is also often i adequately padded — a huge contrast with the vast white space between every other piece of text. Certainly, I really struggle with textual hierarchy when the key headings switch justifications mid location, depending on the page. There are 12 illustrations, plus maps, and they’re gorgeous, but their placement is odd, and there are some pages half blank — instead of the frankly stunning full page paintings, the book would’ve benefited from a lot more smaller sketches. I really love the central map of the hand; it’s visually compelling and useful; it turns the utterly mundane and unromantic point crawl into a thing of beauty.

    Troika! never says this outright, but in my opinion, part of the sales pitch is ease of play. The rules are simple, stats are consistent, character creation takes a minute, but despite all of that, you get to experience the same bizarre world that you always wished Planescape was! This isn’t a review of Troika! But what I’ve noticed is that the line — as I’ve said before, things like Acid Death Fantasy and Spectacle — mistake simple writing for simple play. In elevating simple writing and straightforward layout (to be clear, generally backed by evocative writing and striking art), I feel the line tends to sell itself short — these stop being easy to run, and end up relying instead on the referee, arriving at the same kind of prep-heavy space as Horde of the Dragon Queen, but travelling the opposite way around to get there. If the line have more thought to these ancillary concerns, I think the whole project would hold together more strongly, rather than parasitically thriving on the enthusiasm of its audience and their willingness to mistake elegant prose and clever implied world building for effective and useful referee support. As I said at the top, I think there’s recognition of this problem at Melsonian, or Hand of God wouldn’t exist, and I like Troika! a lot. But there’s still a ways to go, I think, and one thing that would help would be a consistent and deft hand at a house style and developmental direction that isn’t filled with befuddling choices.

    The Hand of God is damned solid, and a lot of fun, with piles of potential for social and faction play, interesting creatures and weird treasures. It really brings some excellent classic play and translates it to the weird city of Troika! in a satisfying way. It’s just heavily marred by inconsistencies that should have been identified in a developmental edit, and a befuddling approach to layout and information design, that contradicts the ease of play that Troika! sells itself on. By itself it is compelling enough for 2 or 3 fun sessions, though, and I feel introducing these factions and characters into your city of Troika! would add to the crazed metropolis in a very pleasing way. If you’re playing Troika! regularly, you should definitely pick up The Hand of God, but it’s a trickier proposition for those who aren’t: I think if the conceit of fleeing a roc across a terrain defined by a giant hand appeals to you, it’s worth adapting it running as a 2-shot.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Dice Curves (Make Dice Work For You #3)

    Make Dice Work For You is a series where I’ll regularly talk through a new way to use dice in your game. It came out of conversation surrounding What to randomise when you’re randomising, and what advanced techniques you can use for specific needs. I’ll where I know, but please help me out if you know a citation and I don’t have one, or if you know an example that I can add!

    Photo by Jonathan Petersson on Pexels.com

    Whenever you roll 2 or more dice and then add the results, the likelihood of any given number in the available range is different. It follows a curve known as a bell curve. In this I’ll be using a bunch of anydice charts to help visualise things.

    If you roll 1d6
    If you roll 2d6

    What this means, is that the smallest and largest numbers are the least likely to occur, and the number that is in the middle is the most likely to occur. This pattern occurs for any dice.

    • Scroll through to see the similar bell-shaped pattern and the specific distributions of chance. This is 1d6.
    • Scroll through to see the similar bell-shaped pattern and the specific distributions of chance. This is 2d4.
    • Scroll through to see the similar bell-shaped pattern and the specific distributions of chance. This is 2d6.
    • Scroll through to see the similar bell-shaped pattern and the specific distributions of chance. This is 2d8.
    • Scroll through to see the similar bell-shaped pattern and the specific distributions of chance. This is 2d10.
    • Scroll through to see the similar bell-shaped pattern and the specific distributions of chance. This is 2d12.

    Oh, and the same curve occurs, but steeper, the more dice you add to the pool, meaning different pools will give you different probability curves for roughly the same set of numbers:

    • This is for 6d4 and 2s12, respectfully. See how different the distribution is (although it’s worth noting that 6d4 is a range from 6 to 24, and 2d12 is a range from 2 to 24, so slightly different).
    • This is for 6d4 and 2s12, respectfully. See how different the distribution is (although it’s worth noting that 6d4 is a range from 6 to 24, and 2d12 is a range from 2 to 24, so slightly different).

    It also works for adding different dice sizes, for what it’s worth. We always have the same shaped likelihood of results:

    This is the curve for 1d6 + 1d4

    The key takeaway here: If you roll more than one dice together, you are changing the odds of your list appearing. Don’t just do it to get a range: “I want 18 results so I’ll just use 3d6” is wrong both because it only gets you 16 results, but also because you’ll rarely see a bunch of those results, and will commonly get a bunch of them. If you want to do that, look at Equal Opportunity Dice. By adding dice together, your values suddenly have meaning attached to them. You need to take advantage of that meaning, or it’ll change the way your table rolls.

    Importantly, the curve will remain the same if you add to it, meaning the likelihood shifts with the numbers. I’m explaining that badly, but it’s useful. Here’s a visual illustration:

    You can see here, that in the 2d4 curve, the likelihood of rolling a 6 is 18.75%, but when you add 4, it’s now 6.25%. Now, 18.75% of the time you’ll roll an 8 or a 10 instead. This is can be used in interesting ways: You could have a list of 13 items, and have a cumulative bonus applied to the roll as certain events develop, with the lower numbers on your list no longer occurring, the middle items changing likelihoods at first more so, and then less, and the higher numbers appearing. I could do this with an encounter table, for example, where the volcano slowly got closer to errupting over time, or a reaction table where you gained reputation over time. It might look like this:

    That’s curves, in a nutshell. They’re everywhere, so pay special attention if you’re rolling with a curve, about exactly where your items are on that curve, and whether that means your items are occurring as often as you want to occur.

    Basic Structure: Roll multiple dice and add the results.

    Effect: A list of items where the largest and smallest results are rarest, and the middle-most result is the most common.

    Requirements: You cannot roll more dice and then drop the highest or lowest or the probability will change for each item.

    Alternatives: Use addition or subtraction bonuses to adjust the numbers affected by the curve.

    Hope this helps!

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and other work, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

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  • Bathtub Review: Roadhouse Feast

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    Roadhouse Feast is a 16 page module for Eldritch Instinct by Linus Weber. In it, you’re stranded with a damaged car and are drawn into a dark ritual when you are forced to stay at a local roadhouse near Arkham, Massachusettes. Eldritch Instinct is a new release cosmic horror game based on Cairn. I received a complementary copy from the author.

    Layout here is in A5, single column, with a single map and no other art. It’s a short module, with only 9 locations and 3 events, so the use of simple headers works well. The cover by Vishnu Prasad is excellent. There’s not much else to say.

    The first page is a timeline, summarising matters. This is great summary; it might benefit from tighter formatting, given the name of two enemies are highlighted, but the NPCs are not, and it’s not clear precisely the timeline at a glance due to the paragraphing structure. The antagonist is sympathetic, and tied to other NPCs in a compelling way, which is likely to cause some very compelling drama, which complicates the pulpy, cosmic horror vibes in a pleasant way. This is covered in more detail on the next page, and it’s good stuff – terse, straightforward, compelling. Next we have a few examples of ways to foreshadow doom for the adventure — I like this as an inclusion in a horror module a lot; it’s brief, but useful.

    The next page is a hook and a prologue; the prologue is a brief few paragraphs of read aloud text. The hook is a little messy, for me — just a few suggestions rather than concrete hooks. I’d always prefer concrete and specific of general suggestions. I do like the addition of specific “bodily insecurities” to the characters, that can be used in both the foreshadowing and in conversation with the dark god that will use them against the characters.

    The locations are briefly and well described, and contains a series of very creepy scenes. I’m concerned that, despite these, most of the clues are entirely in 2 rooms. The structure of this module doesn’t really focus on these clues or locations, which I think is a disappointment — while the player characters here are referred to as investigators, there’s very little investigating to be done. Rather, the plot will march forward through the events, of which there are three. This makes for a far pulpier module than I expected (admittedly in the end notes, it states it’s aiming for pulp, but you don’t get there until page 15). I think this works, to be honest, for something intended as a one-shot — keeps the investigation moving, but I’d love a little more potential for the pleasure you feel as a successful investigator.

    Roadhouse Feast leans solidly into the pulp rather than investigation side of the genre. I’d be careful re: content for certain groups — there’s a fair bit of ritual mutilation and violence to both animals and people in here — and if the group really wants to lean into their player agency this module will struggle with coping with it unless you’re a great improviser. But it’s a good introduction to early 20th century cosmic horror roleplaying, and is an excellent con one-shot that you could hurry through, or lean into the drama and characterisation for a longer and deeper session. I’d definitely consider Roadhouse Feast, if I was looking for a horror module with a classic feel.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and other work, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Likelihood and room size in AD&D

    I’m thinking about megadungeons at the moment, and thinking about the smallest possible unit in a megadungeon, because I know level doesn’t work for me as a smallest unit because I have trouble with a scope of perhaps 10-12 rooms at a time. It occurred to me in the car the other day that geomorphs-type units might be a good way to do this: It’s more interesting to me than designing a dungeon 1 room at a time, but I’d still need a bunch of them to actually make up a whole level. For those purposes, I wanted to figure out what a good size in terms of squares will work for me, for maximum utility.

    Geomorphs by Dyson Logos

    I thought a good place to start would be Gygax’s generators. Delta looked at the AD&D DMG Appendix A and came up with these categorisations:

    • Small — Up to 200 square feet (10×10 or 10×20). Small living quarters or chapel.
    • Medium — Up to 2,000 square feet (from 20×20, 30′ diameter around, to 30×60 or 40×50, etc.). Tower central room, guard hall, castle kitchen, big living quarters.
    • Large — Up to 20,000 square feet (from 50×50, up to 50×100, max 100×200). Keep great hall, largest DMG Appendix A room/ chamber/ cave size.
    • Huge — Up to 200,000 square feet (from 100×200, 150×350m, max 400×500). Major cathedral, largest DMG Appendix A cavern size.

    To clarify in terms of modern equivalents at the top end of these ranges, a small room is master bedroom sized, medium is lecture hall sized, large is about the size of an Olympic ice skating rink, and huge is 4 football fields. The chances of rolling a 20 000 square foot room using the AD&D Appendix A generator is around 0.01%, which means you’ll get it once every 10 000 rooms or so, and the chances of rolling a 2500 square foot room are in the range of 3.5% (about 3 out of 100 rooms), although it’s tricky for me to calculate the chances of room sizes between 2500 and 15 000 because of the choices Gygax made in said appendix.

    The probabilities above are based on these tables. I stuck them in a spreadsheet and then back-computed them to figure out exactly what the chances of something happening would be, given it’s layered four tables deep. I didn’t think this math was particularly interesting or relevant, though.

    Basically, as likelihood was important to me, I’d change Delta’s analysis slightly because my primary goal isn’t description:

    • Small — Up to 200 square feet (10×10 or 10×20). Small living quarters or chapel in a dungeon, bedroom or master bedroom in modern contexts. 16% of rooms.
    • Medium — Up to 2,000 square feet (from 20×20, 30′ diameter around, to 30×60 or 40×50, etc.). Tower central room, guard hall or barracks, castle kitchen, big living quarters in a dungeon, university lecture hall in a modern context. 74% of rooms.
    • Large — Up to 5,000 square feet (from 50 x 50 up to 50 x 100). Keep great hall or church, or basketball court in a modern context. 10% of rooms.
    • Huge — Up to 20,000 square feet (from 50×50, up to 50×100, max 100×200). Cathedral or cave room, Olympic ice skating rink in a modern context. Closer to 0% of rooms than 1%, but perhaps 1-in-1000 rooms.
    • Massive — Up to 200,000 square feet (from 100×200, 150×350m, max 400×500). The whole castle or cathedral grounds, four football fields in a modern context. Actually 0% of rooms, which is fair because this is a ridiculous size. But, if you wanted a village in your dungeon, this would be the size to pick.

    If I want my geomorph to be able to fit a large room, then I’ll need to make it a square number, so 5041 square feet, which is 71 feet to a size. That’s 14 x 5 foot squares to a side. Nightwick Abbey, my touchstone for geomorph-based dungeons, is 10 x 5 foot squares to a side, and I was expecting a larger geomorph here, because I effectively want to fit a conceptual set of rooms in each geomorph — the entire base for a faction, perhaps, or at least a significant section of it. It needs to be a geomorph, though, so I need to think about exits. Most 10 x 10 geomorphs have potential exits at 3 and 7. If I have a larger geomorph, it would be better to have 3 potential exits than 2, so a 15 x 15 geomorph makes more sense, because I can have exits at 4, 8 and 12, with 3 squares between each one. That puts our geomorph area at 5625 square feet, which means we can fit a large room as well as some hallways or secret spaces if we so desire. Coincidentally, this makes the size of a geomorph roughly the half of a tennis court on one side of the net, which is easy to visualise. A neat side-effect of this size is that I can fit a huge room in a 2 x 2 grid of geomorphs, so if I wanted to randomly generate them (this wasn’t my plan), I could reasonably include this as a rare chance, but more importantly, it should fit in with other geomorphs. I’d need a 5 x 7 grid of geomorphs to hit close to the massive size cavern, but that’s supposed to be ultra-rare anyway.

    That’s basically my working for an AD&D inspired geomorph. I’ll throw my mathematics here at this point, and then come back to it:

    This is the breakdown of how Appendix N’s tables for Rooms and Chambers (not Caves and Caverns, which occur at referee fiat) come out as a percentage of total rooms.
    This is the breakdown of what the limit of the potentially infinitely large unusual sized room of 3400+ square feet is likely to be.
    This breaks down likelihood of room and chamber sizes by probability, which is effectively all rooms if you ignore rooms “Large” and based above on my criteria above. If I wanted to randomly generate, most of it would be based on these chances, and I’d fiat that final 10% of rooms 2000+ square feet in size.

    All that in mind, I’ll revise my criteria because mapping:

    • Small — 4-6 squares. Small living quarters or chapel in a dungeon, bedroom or master bedroom in modern contexts. 16% of rooms.
    • Medium — 8-20 squares. Tower central room, guard hall or barracks, castle kitchen, big living quarters in a dungeon, university lecture hall in a modern context. 74% of rooms.
    • Large — 21-75 squares. Keep great hall or church, or basketball court in a modern context. 10% of rooms.
    • Huge — 4 geomorphs or 300 squares. Cathedral or cave room, Olympic ice skating rink in a modern context. ~1-in-1000 rooms.
    • Massive — 20 or more geomorphs or 1500 squares. The whole castle or village or cathedral grounds, four football fields in a modern context.

    Or, if you still want to randomly generate, it would look something like this, with the rule being you continue rolling, drawing as you go, until you can’t draw the room you rolled inside the 15 x 15 square geomorph, and then stop.

    Ok, there’s my little dungeon geomorph process. Was it worth it? Definitely not, I should’ve written a review.

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  • Equal Opportunity Dice (Make Dice Work For You #2)

    Make Dice Work For You is a series where I’ll regularly talk through a new way to use dice in your game. It came out of conversation surrounding What to randomise when you’re randomising, and what advanced techniques you can use for specific needs. I’ll where I know, but please help me out if you know a citation and I don’t have one, or if you know an example that I can add!

    So, you want to have a list where all the items are equally likely to be chosen. Some obvious answers:

    • 1d4 has 4 options
    • 1d6 has 6 options
    • 1d8 has 8 options
    • 1d10 has 10 options
    • 1d12 has 12options
    • 1d20 has 20 options

    If you’re willing to assume the person rolling your list has zocchi dice, you can also use lists of 3, 5, 14, 16, 24 and 30 as well, all by rolling a single die. If you roll any 2 dice and add them, however, you get a bell curve — the list is no longer equal opportunity. Can you combine 2 dice without a bell curve?

    Yes, you can, by taking the face value of each die, and assigning them to a set of digits, usually tens and ones. This is how the percentile die in your dice set works. All you need is pre-determined order — one dice is always used for the tens column and the other always for the ones column for this to work; most commonly this is determined by colour or by order of rolling. We tend to call these “dXX” where the XX is the highest possible value you can roll, but one quirk is that that number won’t be the total number of options, but rather those two digits multiplied together will be the number of items available for your list.

    Some bvious choices:

    • d44 has 16 options
    • d66 has 36 options
    • d88 has 64 options
    • d100 has 100 options; we’d always prefer these dice labeled 0-9 for these purposes.
    • Using the d12, d14, d16, d20 and d24 in this way is possible, but the math isn’t as intuitive for average audiences.

    Note: Evidencing this in Anydice makes for some really boring graphs, but this is the formula for the script to price that the curve is flat for any of these rolls so long as they are ordered: output dN*10+dN, where N is the die size.

    Less obviously, you can combine different sized dice for other sized lists. These can be more intuitive, because it’s easier to remember which die is tens and which is ones to preserve order (which, remember, is essential for these tales to work):

    • d46 and d64 have 24 options
    • d48 and d84 have 32 options
    • d410 and d104 have 40 options
    • d68 and d86 have 48 options
    • d610 and d106 have 60 options
    • d810 and d108 have 80 options

    So, we have 19 options between 4 and 100 to easily write a list without preference in terms of probability. Cool.

    Note: To evidence these in Anydice, simply output dN*10+dM, where N and M are the die size.

    The astute among you realise that this works for any set of digits: You could do it for hundreds, tens, and ones, or even thousands, hundreds, tens and ones. Yes, you could, but these rapidly get unwieldy. If you needed a very big but unusual sized table, you’d probably want to put smaller dice sizes up first in the reading order, because the numbers get very big very fast, and having many dice of the same type make it harder to preserve order:

    • d444 has 64 options
    • d666 has 216 options
    • d4444 has 256 options
    • d6666 has 1296 options
    • d8888 has 4096 options

    Note: To evidence these in Anydice, simply output dK*1000+dL*100+dM*10+dN, where K, L, M and N are the die sizes.

    Personally, I don’t see much of a use case for these complex flat distributions, but there is one: The larger your flat number, the more chance there is for secondary features. You could assign special stacking conditions to doubles, triples, or quadruples, for example. A random encounter table for a city of 256 characters, who’ll try to sell you something on doubles, act suspicious on triples, and hostile or steal from you on quadruples might be a good way to use this. If you assigned wide ranges to results, you could get these benefits without hundreds of entries, and you could manage probability closely too if you wanted to do some math, for a more labour intensive probability curve that favoured certain results. The precise probabilities of doubles get messy, and are unique for each set of dice, although as a rule of thumb I think doubles are more likely with smaller dice, and I think that likelihood is about 1-in-N for doubles, 1-in-N^2 for triples and 1-in-N^3 for quadruples. An example of these kind of secondary features (which Prismatic Wasteland popularised as “overloading”) is in Zzarchov’s Lost in the Wilderness:

    From “Lost in the Wilderness”, this uses not only doubles and triples, but also runs and maximums!

    Note: If any Anydice wizards know how to generate precise probabilities for doubles and triples in a 3-dice set, please let me know and I’ll include your work or a link to it in this post as evidence here, or amend the above.

    Ok, I don’t think I need to give an example of how to use a flat list, but just to clarify what the numbering would look like, for a d44 table for example, the leg hand column would be: 11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 22, 23, 24, 31, 32, 33, 34, 41, 42, 43, 44, for a total of 16 entries. Here’s an example of a d66 table from Forest Farragoes by kTrey of d4caltrops:

    You can see how colour is used to preserve order, and how numbering isn’t from 1 to 36 despite there being 36 item.

    A final note for those looking for complexity: If you decide to add advantage to these rolls (i.e. roll 3, take the highest 2 results, in order), you introduce a probability curve to the list. I think this is a bad idea, personally, because to me the elegance of these tables is the flat probability at high numbers. But if you’re looking for something very specific, it might suit your need. Goblin’s Henchmen talks about the implications of that here.

    To summarise, Equal Opportunity Dice:

    Basic Structure: Roll multiple dice, preserving order, with each result resulting either hundreds, tens, or ones.

    Effect: A list of items where there is equal chance for any to occur, at a very flexible number of list results.

    Requirements: Roll order must be preserved so that a single die equates to tens, and another to ones, and you cannot roll more dice and then drop the highest or lowest or the probability will change for each item.

    Alternatives: You can add additional information to doubles, triples and quadruples without impacting the probability of a given list item occurring.

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    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and other work, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

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  • Bathtub Review: The Cleaning of Prison Station Echo

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    Cleaning of Prison Station Echo is a 51 page module for Mothership by D. Kenny & Haig Morrison and illustrated by Evlyn Moreau with maps by Guy Pradel. In it the player characters are unarmed janitorial staff on a prison full of zombie-like ex-prisoners. I purchased this myself.

    The writing itself could easily have overextended itself: There are nineteen pages of set up alone, before the prison itself is described. Admittedly, some of this is optional, like the two additional starting scenarios, but most of it is necessary set up: Factions, the virus, and the like. These are individually, thank goodness, brief and punchy, with no single section (not description, but collection of all the faction descriptions for example) being more than half a page long. The descriptions aren’t pretty, but are juicy, and lend themselves to the sense of corporate farce that lead to a zombie outbreak that only a team of janitors can solve: “…failure means death if it interferes with XeroCorp’s public image.” and “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave…just kidding, I probably can.”

    I really enjoy the location descriptions. They fun, and collect a fun situation in a nutshell, and they don’t outstay their welcome at only 16 rooms. It’s a fun romp across two levels, although the maps don’t leave much room for spatial or exploratory play and are largely playgrounds in which to place the admittedly compelling characters and scenarios. I don’t love the choice to place the two levels at opposite ends of the book, though, as I spent a significant part of my read-through thinking there was no map of the basement at all. I should add that this module is packed full of charming tables: Each level gets its own set of tables; there is a custom panic table; a bunch of unique backgrounds. This stuff is all great. Just great.

    The last ten pages of the module are a “sandbox” for playing on Carnath, the planet that the prison is on. This extra section just screams Kickstarter stretch goal to me. I put sandbox in quotation marks, because honestly it’s not enough. It’s five well-described factions (two of them present in the core module), with a faction diagram that masquerades cleverly as point-crawl style map of the surface of Carnath. I can probably work with this; the factions and their characters are strong and interesting, the relationships really clear. This seems like an incredible basis for a sandbox that is missing from this module, and I’d love to see that sandbox actually developed into something a little more like Desert Moon of Karth, rather than tacked onto the end. It shows that the authors are capable of great things, they’re just not showing me in the scope of this module, so it feels like wasted space, especially as three of these factions don’t tie into the core dungeon.

    Layout is colourful and clear, in A5 zine format, using a unique colour palette that complements the exceptional art which is also very unique in the Mothership line. I don’t love the heavy bullet pointing as an aesthetic choice, but I don’t think it affects the usability. I can never praise Evelyn Moreau’s art enough, it’s so characterful and charming. Evelyn, we have to collaborate on something one day! The maps are excellent and match the overarching style; especially the opening spread with incredibly charming isometric cut outs of the various areas of the station. Prison Station Echo at once has a spread-to-spread experimentation and an abundance of typefaces that feels recognisably Mothership but also has a voice of its own.

    Overall, the core of Prison Station is an excellent module, more of a point-crawl than a dungeon-crawl. Highly recommended. It strays a bit from its primary directive, though, with a bunch of additional starting scenarios and an abortive attempt at a sandbox, which dilute the main product from a succinct and excellent one. That said, excise those from the module and use them as a basis for your own work, and they’re great. I know that from the creator’s perspective, this is bonus content, but from the readers perspective, it’s incomplete work. Aside from those additional concerns: This is a fun, corporate horror comedy take on Mothership, with a unique voice, that I’d enjoy running, and probably would run over the excellent Gradient Descent for something that sits in a similar ballpark if I’m pitching to my table.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

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  • Bathtub Review: Daedelus Station & The Rimspace Racing League

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    Daedelus Station is a 43 page module for Mothership by S. Murphy, with art by Guy Pradel. In it, you investigate a dark plot surrounding a space-racing league. I backed this during Mothership Month.

    The module begins with a few reasons to be at the station in the first place. Sadly there’s nothing here that isn’t implied by the locations themselves, they don’t provide any personal connections or linkages: For example it suggests your ship suffers a mechanical failure so you need to go to the mechanic. I’d love for these to be juicy hooks, instead. From here we spend a page covering the Icarian League (the faction that runs the Rimspace Racing League), a page on the planet the space station orbits around, and a page covering security and the racing league itself. At this point I’m struggling to figure out where I am and what is going on. What I want out of a module is to be excited to turn the page and see what’s coming next — here, I’m not sure who Krule is or why I care, I don’t know why I need to know about security, or the planet Garrus, or the Racing League. The order of information here is doing the opposite of drawing me in. A pitch isn’t just your first paragraph: The whole zine needs to be the pitch. I should be gasping for more.

    Then we get to the conspiracy proper, I remain confused: Why won’t it tell me what’s going on? The answer is that what’s going on is randomly generated. All four potential culprits have a spread devoted to it, but the decision to randomise here means my movement through the module as a referee remains directionless, and hence I’m a good chunk of the way in and I’m not yet excited to play, because I now have to choose one of these four factions.

    I think this is a big misstep: The energy spent on describing multiple outcomes and methods could’ve been spent describing how they’re red herrings or how they’re involved. There’s potential here — particularly if you’re trying to make this into a campaign hub — for some incredible intrigue, but a lot of the work that is in here is ignored if you run it by the book. I want creators — especially ones with such excellent potential as Murphy has — to spend their energy digging into their ideas, not wasting them on things that are never to be used. If time was spent figuring out how these cogs interact rather than giving me as a referee choices, this political arena could be a firecracker waiting to go off. As is, we have four flat options rather than one that pops.

    We then get into the locations proper. These are quite wordy, although well written in a colloquial voice I like — very different in approach though to In Carmine. There’s a little too much telling and not enough showing for me — the menu in the high class restaurant for example is over half description and less than half actual menu items. The character descriptions are universally excellent, though, and I wish there were at least 1 in every area — characters are the most compelling part of the module, with memorable personality traits and agendas: “…frog-like individual dressed in a 1930’s style suit…usually tries to go in for a hug…”

    The module closes with the race itself — rules on how to bet, sabotage, and run the races. The race rules are fine. For me, the best racing rules are in Song of the Frogacle and they haven’t been beaten yet. The pilots get their own descriptions (weirdly different in structure to the rest of the NPCs) which is a nice touch, and they’re nicely manipulable. They’re each in a location, however frustratingly they’re not marked as being in those locations in the descriptions for those locations.

    The layout here is straightforward, easy to read, but nothing flashy. It doesn’t feel like most Mothership, but that makes sense for the theme, and Guy Pradel’s art is exceptional at bringing out the golden age vibe of the Rimspace Racing League. The combination of “un-Mothership-like layout and golden age art makes this one stand out in the Mothership crowd, in a very good way. It’s really good stuff.

    The concept for Daedalus Station is absolutely fun, but for me, it just doesn’t hang together. I’m being presented with a strange and unique situation — a space racing league with assassinations and betting and intrigue — but it doesn’t successfully guide me through how to run it, or make it compelling or exciting for me to want to run. I don’t have the time or energy to take the pieces presented in Daedalus Station and assemble them into something as explosive and compelling as they have the potential to be. I just wish it did that itself. It’s a disappointing outcome when the last module of Murphy’s I reviewed, In Carmine, spent a year being my recommendation for best introductory module to Mothership. They’re very different modules, and I’d put this down to teething issues with entering new, more social territory. I have not been soured to see Murphy’s future work.

    That said, Daedalus Station is a very unique set up, unlike anything else available in Mothership: If you find this high class gambling crime scene compelling to run your campaign in, and you’ve got some time to piece things together (or perhaps are a master improviser), Daedalus Station & The Rimspace Racing League is a perfect place to start.

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    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

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  • Bathtub Review: In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe is a 54 page module for Old School Essentials written and illustrated by Jacob Fleming. It contains the the 40 x 80 mile Gemthrone Wilderness, 5 settlements and 9 dungeons including the titular Tower Silveraxe (although that’s not what it’s called in the module). In 54 pages. This is going to be a challenge to pull off, as we have only about 3 pages available per location, if we’re lucky. I’m looking forward to either a trainwreck or a masterpiece. Which will it be? I bought this on Drivethru.

    I don’t usually open with this, but the painted cover is really great. It brings very strong 1990s TSR vibes — Larry Elmore and the like. The art style inside is a much more cartoonish line art, which I also really like, and there is art on every spread and most every page if you include maps, but the cover in particular stands right out. Given I started with the cover, I’ll hit layout next, before getting into the meat: It’s a simple, 2 column layout with tight margins and claustrophobic spacing. I don’t love the font choices, but they do their job of differentiating and aiding in navigation, as does the art and maps in the absence of white space — and the art is clearly drawn for the available space, featuring some very interesting wrapping. It also uses a bunch of useful and interesting iconography, as well as appropriate use of text flagging (not overly complex or overused). It’s clear there were compromises made in order to pack this all into so few pages — it’s available in print directly from the author’s website for only $15, so perhaps it was worth it. It’s very functional, and feels heavily inspired by ‘90’s TSR yet again here.

    We open with 2 pages introducing Gemthrone and its history, and then 2 pages covering the factions. While the factions have interesting twists each, they aren’t summarised very well, and I’d much prefer it in a terser, clearer format so I didn’t have to take notes about their goals or assets. In the rumours table, there’s a clever conceit of highlighting the falsified parts of rumours with italics, which is very clever and should be more widely adopted. We’ll come

    back to the rumours later. I also really like the weather advice, which basically says “tell the party in advance, they’re experienced travellers they know when there’s a storm coming”. I can’t believe I’ve never received this advice before, but it’s startlingly obvious in retrospect. There is also a cipher puzzle hidden on statues across the wilderness, which is a great puzzle for the puzzle loving tables, and one that isn’t too challenging for the puzzle haters. Great little addition in my opinion.

    And then, from page 9 we start with the key. The town designated your starting point, Karn Buldahr, reveals a few things about what to expect: Keying is brief, names are Greyhawkish, Character traits aren’t spelled out here at all — it’s just Lodwaelyn Kraghorn, raucous female dwarf and that’s all you’ve got. That’s enough for embodying them for the moment, but it’s not enough to engage her in the larger story without significant improvisation or expansion.

    The second set of locations — Amethyst Lake Ranch — repeats some of the same scenes — long-written scenes in need of an edit or a summary, with a questgiver and a local problem that needs solving. In this case it’s associated with a dungeon — but there’s no hooks leading to the dungeon or even the lake, which apparently has a grim reputation (although there’s no rumour concerning it) and the only potential hook — the dwarf who owns the ranch — is too gruff to talk about his feelings so won’t tell you about the lake.

    This kind of writing — uninspiring characters, incomplete or disconnected locations — is pretty emblematic of what we see throughout In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe. It screams “I didn’t playtest” or “I didn’t hire an editor” or perhaps both, given no editors or playtesters are credited. It really leans into quantity as a selling point, hoping that nobody will notice that the only way to find them is to wonder aimlessly. Coming back to the initial rumours — none of them point the heroes to anywhere except for Amethyst Lake Ranch (the aforementioned location that goes nowhere) and the mage Myrya. Myrya doesn’t go anywhere — just pays a bounty on finding crystals. Of the 20 town rumours (across 4 towns), 1 points to the climactic adventure location, and 1 points to a treasure map. So out of 25 rumours, just 4 help the players find anything specific. What this is telling me, is that this module expects the players to wonder aimlessly in the home of finding treasure or gems based on rumours. I know we have a social contract that says “Adventurers adventure”, but I haven’t ever been at a table where the players didn’t like some kind of direction.

    And that’s really disappointing, because for the most part the dungeons and other locations are a lot of fun. There are classic challenges like water termites that devour any wooden items you’re carrying, lots of beginner level traps, secret puzzle doors. The Tower of the Builders — the climactic location — has an appropriately looped design over multiple floors. One of the towns has political intrigue to engage in. It’s fun stuff. Drop in one of these locations and you’ve got a session or 2 of fun.

    There are 3 physical map handouts for the players — very cool, if you find them, plus the cipher codes, which is a decent amount of props in a module this short, and at the back there’s a bestiary detailing all the creatures not in the basic OSE bestiary.

    One big problem here is that the setting depends on wilderness travel, but the wilderness travel is just uninteresting as a whole — there’s nothing spicy or interesting in the random encounters. The random encounters with non-hostile NPCs are not detailed — are they a dwarf we know? No, just dwarves. If I were to run this, I’d have to either overhaul the wilderness altogether, or overhaul the rumours, or both, or I fear my sessions would be filled with the kind of awkwardness I haven’t experienced since I ran Horde of the Dragon Queen.

    Coming back to the question at the top, is this a masterpiece or a train wreck? Well, honestly, neither. This is a whole setting in 64 pages! That’s a hell of an achievement! And to be honest, for the kind of low-stakes, beer and pretzels play that this aims for the simple keying, stereotypical characters and classically designed dungeons are kind of perfect. It doesn’t have space for faction play or much in the way of social play, which I favour. And it’s disappointing that with better developmental editing and more solid wilderness travel rules, it could have been rife with hooks and excitement, but instead the locations are simply there. It could’ve been a masterpiece, and probably without changing the word count. Regardless, In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe is a strong value proposition if you’re looking for a generic fantasy mini-setting with a solid 10 or more sessions worth of play, so long as your table likes exploring the wilderness and dungeon-crawling as their primary occupations.

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